Characteristics of words

There are certain characteristics that are considered essential in the definition of the word in English.

(1) The word is an uninterruptible unit. When elements are added to it to modify its meaning, they are never included within the word. The root of the word is always left intact, whatever manipulations are carried out. Internal stability of the word is never compromised. The extra elements are added either in the pre- or post-position to the stem (prefixes and suffixes, respectively). A stem may consist of one or more morphemes, whereas a root is used to refer to a stem consisting of a single morpheme.

(2) Secondly, the word may be made up of one or more morphemes. If it is a one-morpheme word, it cannot be broken down further into smaller meaningful units (e.g., man, dog, cat etc.) They are termed ‘ simple words’ and are ‘minimum free forms’, since they may stand by themselves and act as minimally complete utterances. If more morphemes than one make up a word, they may either be complex or compound. Complex words are ones that can be broken down into one free form and one or more bound forms: uncool, breakable, prettier etc. Compounds, on the other hand, consist of more than one free form (candlestick, arrowhead etc.) A mention needs to be made also of words incorporating both complex and compound forms (unturndownable, windshield wiper, ungentlemanly). Having said that, it is not always obvious whether or not a given sound sequence should be considered a morpheme. The morpheme, for instance, may have ceased to be recognizable due to the process of linguistic change. The word like ‘window’ is a case in point (-ow is related to ‘eye’). As is ‘refer’, where the morpheme –fer comes from Latin ‘ferre’ (carry). When we deal with cases like that, the common practice is that, unless the word can be completely analyzed into morphemes, it should be regarded as unanalysable. Another possibility that needs mention is that a morpheme may not constitute a morpheme in all its occurrences (-er in ‘quicker’ and ‘plumber’ is a suffix, but in ‘never’ and ‘answer’ it is not a morpheme).

(3) The word is part of the hierarchy at the level between the morpheme and the phrase, as it occurs typically in the structure of phrases (morphemes are used as building blocks to construct words, words, in their turn, are used to build phrases, phrases to build clauses, and clauses to build sentences). This is the typical mapping of lower level into higher level units. This is not to say, however, that higher level units may not be used to construct lower level units. For example, Johnny-come-lately (Informal: a newcomer, latecomer, or late starter, especially a recent adherent to a cause or trend) can be used as an attribute to modify another noun as in She might take offense if some Johnny - come - lately thinks he can do a better job.

(4) Finally, it is an essential feature of the word that it should belong to a specific word class or part of speech. Where the same form appears in more than one class, which happens quite frequently in English, we should regard the various occurrences as separate words (fine, think etc.).